Successful Startup (Part 9)

Efficacy. The entrepreneur's dream. The reward is priceless when the vision and the hard work meet together at the point of product delivery. The product is ready to be shipped. Four years of research and development. Two years of implementation. One year of beta testing. Six months with early adopters, during the time we trained more than 200 professional system installers. Software certification. Documentation. Manufacturing line test equipment. Supply chain management. Packaging. User's discussion forum, already humming. Ready to go.

Our first product, delivered. At WiHo.me, we do not make products. Through the research, development and design we make our customers' products better. The first commercial fruit of this symbiosis goes to market in May. It is the most important milestone our company have reached. We have this deep feeling we deliver the quality. The customers will be the judges.

Myself, I strongly believe in investing in quality. Quality is expensive and hard to sell, especially to investors. They drive the best cars and eat the best food, but they usually look for fast ROI. Quality is never fast. But it is sticky and long lasting. There is always this fundamental question: are we doing this for a short or for a long run? When founding the company I wanted to build something really solid. Apart from the passion to create and fascination with technology, there was the fatigue with the surrounding mediocrity of stuff lying on shop shelves.

We've had endless discussions about the competition. And the conclusion was surprising: we would fight for consumer's time and attention. Most of us (consumers) have more money than time to spend. Say, we are offering a smart home solution (actually, we do). Buying a smart home system requires time: to understand the need, to do market research, to compare the products, to buy, to install, to learn using it. There are hundreds of products fighting for these time slots. Mastering the GoPro action camera takes minimum a week. From realizing there was no memory card in the package to the fight with installing the drivers and applications. Moving stuff to a new smartphone takes another week (learning all the new features, moving apps and data, selecting a new sleeve). There are too many temptations and not enough time. That is why the last thing we would like to do is to disappoint the Customer.

We are far from perfect. But we are learning continuously. And we have this precise focus on ease of use and quality and the desire to deliver on what we promise. The Team stands by this statement. It is not an easy task and requires a lot of everyday hard work, but I feel the market will reward us.